Is this really that surprising? Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations?
Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non approved opinions is behind the never ending stream of invective directed at the big tech companies[1].
Martin Gurri’s book on this loss of control, The Revolt of the Public, is amazing by the way[2].
> Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations?
You really can't see the difference between the two? If Mark Cuban has a problem with a player and cuts him from a game, then only the Maverick's suffer. If he (owned a paper and) has a problem with a politician and demands hit pieces, the whole country suffers.
Perhaps "surprising" is the wrong word, but this absolutely is the problem; billionaire-owned "news" organisations able to propagandise with very little opposition. Although the question of who the staff class is also important; people have started to notice that the (publicly owned!) BBC's political presenter Andrew Neil works for all sorts of Conservative party-aligned institutions like the Spectator.
A skeptical mind should immediately ask "wait, that sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory, am I to believe Jeff Bezos is acting as an editor for the newspaper he owns?" Which is a perfectly valid question.
Noam Chomsky explains to a BBC journalist how it can be accomplished much more cleverly:
Reporter: How can you know that I'm self-censoring, how can you know that a journalist is self-censoring?
Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.
You really can't see the difference between the two? If Mark Cuban has a problem with a player and cuts him from a game, then only the Maverick's suffer. If he (owned a paper and) has a problem with a politician and demands hit pieces, the whole country suffers.